Top Soviet Woman Expresses Views About Homeland

DATELINE

MOSCOW -- Aleksandra P. Biryukova is indignant about the high prices charged by some of this country`s new private businesses.

She does not like the angry books of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, preferring authors who write more ``beautifully and philosophically.``

She contends that the reason few women have advanced to the upper ranks of Soviet power is not a bias toward men, but rather women`s natural inclination toward children and family.

Biryukova, the highest-ranking woman in the Soviet Union, revealed these glimpses of her thinking on Monday at a news conference, her first since she was appointed a non-voting member of the ruling Politburo on Sept. 30.

On matters of economy, social order and taste, her answers reflected a woman essentially conservative, perhaps a prerequisite in a political system that does not tend to reward women of strongly unconventional views.

Only once did she veer slightly into the terrain of feminism, when pressed for details of her private life and privileges by reporters who rarely have access to the topmost political leaders. Did she have a maid? Someone asked.

``I don`t have a maid at home,`` she answered. ``My husband always does all the housework.``

Biryukova, who will be 60 next month, is only the second woman in Soviet history to be named to the Politburo. The other, Yekaterina A. Furtseva, was dropped from the ruling party body in 1961 and later disciplined in a scandal involving construction of a country home for her daughter.

Biryukova worked her way up through the textile industry, the official labor unions and the party to her current post as chairman of the government bureau in charge of ``social development,`` which deals with problems including labor conditions, consumer problems, housing and health.

With her blue suit with a red party pin at the lapel and pink blouse with a bow at the neck, she seemed on Monday to be the model of a contemporary Communist career woman.

The news conference was billed as a chance to hear Biryukova outline the government`s program for rectifying severe shortages of consumer goods, but reporters seized the opportunity to elicit information about her work habits (12 to 14 hours a day) her pleasures (skiing, swimming and opera) and especially her views on the status of women in the Soviet Union.

Women here generally hold the lowest-paying jobs, and do most of the housework and standing in line as well. But feminism has never made much headway in the Soviet Union, impeded by the strong matriarchal tradition of Russian families and the official Soviet gospel that women suffer no discrimination.

Biryukova evidently sees her role, to some extent, as an ombudsmen for women but not an agitator for women`s equality.

She said she was so scandalized by an article last week in Moscow News, a firsthand report by a woman treated with cruel indifference at a Moscow abortion clinic, that she immediately called the minister of health and ordered an investigation.

But while she said the high abortion rate here is ``not normal,`` her inclination was to discount the problem.

She sharply understated the number of abortions in the country -- she said it is about equal to the number of babies born, whereas official census data put the number of abortions much higher -- and she predicted that the government would have adequate alternative forms of birth control available in one and a half to two years.

Biryukova said women are well represented in local government and second- echelon official jobs, but they rarely rise to the top because it virtually requires that a woman give up thoughts of children.

``Believe me, it is not so simple,`` she said. Although she did not say so, she and her husband, a retired army colonel, reportedly do not have children.

On policy matters, she held closely to the middle of the party line, a cautious step behind Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

The government`s plan to remedy the plague of shortages, she said, was to invest more in factories for consumer goods and provide factory workers with new incentives.